


Aurelius

by Chi-chi-chimaera (gestalt1)



Category: Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Basically Dragons, Gen, Genetically Engineered Beings, Non-Human Intelligence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-31 20:05:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15126881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gestalt1/pseuds/Chi-chi-chimaera
Summary: Henry Wu has always had a grand vision. His ambition is to change the world. Now with the Indoraptor, that vision will become a reality.(Fallen Kingdom AU with a human-intelligence level Indoraptor.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by several stories on AO3 that feature intelligent raptors.

“Magnificent,” Henry Wu said, as the final pieces of eggshell sloughed from the back of his newest creation. The small black raptor turned its head up towards him where he was bent over the incubator and creeled in hunger. Henry dipped his hand into the pail of ground meat at his side and dropped little pieces of it into the waiting, gaping jaws. His eye was caught by the ripple of gold running down the flank of the beast. He brushed a finger along it, marvelling at the warmth of the little body. The raptor chirped in pleasure and snuggled into the contact. 

“Aurelius,” Wu said aloud, the name coming to him inspired by that band of gold. “You shall be the emperor of my new world.”

\----

Even as a child Henry Wu imagination had only been surpassed by his ambition. He read voraciously, skipping between fantasy, science-fiction, and non-fiction. The world in his books was a better one than the one he lived in, and he soon realised he wanted to change things. He wanted to remake the world anew - and as the years passed, he began to understand how he could. 

His childhood had been conventional in many senses. He enjoyed what little of school he thought was useful, and hated the rest. He had never learned to make friends, and for the most part Henry didn’t care about that. He didn’t like other people. They didn’t make sense the way the ones in his books did. He knew that he was clever, and that he was envied because of it, but he didn’t at that time understand how envy turned into bullying. 

Later he learned that others often wished to destroy what they could never possess. The sharp intelligence which placed him so far above his dull peers and which should have earned him their respect as their better could not stave off violence. Returning it with violence of his own could. Running away had forced him to be fast, and after the first few times stabbing an assailant with a needle-sharp pencil and bolting from the scene of the crime their envy started to become fear. 

That suited better. Fear was the cousin of respect, after all. 

The power of fear was something that stayed with him as he grew up. It remained throughout his years at MIT when his peers finally began to give him the respect he deserved, and even after that when he went to work for InGen. It was the first thing that came into his mind when he was approached by John Hammond and told the details of his project to bring the dead of sixty-five million years back to life. That project was the spark of inspiration, the sudden eureka moment, for the change that Henry had been turning over in his mind for so long. 

Henry put aside his lions, his tigers, wolves, bears, and orcas, and turned his mind to the genetic sequences of the greatest and most fearsome carnivores to walk the earth. 

Eventually his experiments bore fruit for Hammond, and in creating the species for the first Jurassic Park Henry proved to himself that it _could_ be done. Filling in the gaps in DNA with spliced pieces could create a viable, living creature. One that could breed even, although that had not been an intended part of Wu’s own research. It was a useful piece of the puzzle however. In the difficult years after that with InGen starting to struggle in the wake of the park’s doom, he continued to work on the process of hybridisation. He even wrote a book hoping to inspire the interest of investors, which appeared to have worked a few years later when Masrani Corp made an offer to buy the company. 

The picture that Henry was building was slow to come into focus. His own personal work always had to come second to the work that paid the bills and made it all possible. For a brief spell he began to worry that he would not have enough time to finish the creature and its lineage in his own lifespan. Perhaps it was that as much as the significant sum that Benjamin Lockwood offered that made him agree to the human cloning project. In the end it was simpler and more successful than he had expected, and he was able to present Mr Lockwood with the ‘granddaughter’ he wanted within a year. 

It was a comfort to know he could continue himself in that fashion if need be. 

In the end however the picture began to finally come together before he really needed to consider the option. The Jurassic World projects gave him the final clues he needed; first the behaviouralist approach of the velociraptor program given over to Owen Grady, and then the true hybrid Indominus Rex. Knowing that this might be his only chance to test several of his ideas in a full-scale, real-life application Henry was able to admit to himself in hindsight that he might have gone somewhat overboard with the Indominus. Still it was a success, for some definitions of the experiment. 

Henry’s personal project had never been about creating an animal to be used by the military, although it was a useful fiction to secure additional funding. A creature that could stand up to human soldiers though… yes, that was part of what he needed. The Indominus certainly proved it could do that. And as his first trial of human-like intelligence it also held some promise. Of course unlike Grady’s raptors the Indominus was a display animal and it hadn’t been possible to insert himself into the process after its birth to give it some kind of socialisation. It was thus as limited as any human child abandoned alone in the wilderness would be. Yet even then it had a cunning that was more than that of any simple beast. 

With his next creation he would finally put all of the pieces together. 

\----

“Come here to your father Aurelius,” Henry said, scooping the just-born raptor up into his arms. Tiny claws caught on the wool of his sweater and he untangled them gently, examining the little paws. “One, two, three fingers and a thumb,” he said softly, wiggling the pads beneath each talon gently. He was surprised to find how instant and striking the attachment was. From an evolutionary standpoint he had been expecting it; he shared a genetic link with the Indoraptor after all. He was the human sample he had built this creature’s brain from, as well as its opposable thumb. He was a father without all of the human mess that usually involved. But expecting and experiencing were two very different things.

He knew his next few weeks would be a time of little sleep and constant engagement with the baby now resting gently in his arms, much as it would be with any human child. It had been so with Grady’s raptors, although they matured faster than Aurelius was going to. At least it would not be so prolonged a childhood as a human. In the confines of an egg the brain could be allowed to develop without concern for the physical limitations of the span of a human’s hips. 

For now he was the only person who would be down here in the laboratory on a regular basis. Eli cared about the prospect of making money not for the product itself, and while the aftermath of Isla Nublar continued to play itself out across the international stage it was not the time to draw attention to themselves by attempting to recruit other geneticists or scientists. Finally Henry had the luxury of privacy, of a lab all his own. Finally he would be able to devote the attention to his grand project that it deserved. 

“You and I are going to do great things together Aurelius,” he promised. 

\----

When Aurelius wasn’t eating or sleeping - and he did much of both at first - Henry read to him. Hearing his voice was an important part of his social development as well as being key to the parent-child bond between them. If the human-derived genes had taken as they ought then it would be no simple imprinting, but a true relationship with everything that could go wrong with it. For many years Henry had never imagined himself as a parent, and still couldn’t imagine it with a human child. But this… his sleek son of scale and muscle, was something else. Aurelius was already the size of a large dog, more coordinated every day, with bright intelligent eyes that took in everything around him. 

Although he began with simple picture books appropriate for a small human child, he soon found himself straying to more advanced material. It was hard to tell what might be too much for the raptor’s growing brain. 

Aurelius listened to the tales he was read with a keen interest in any case, never distracted or inattentive. Henry told him about the ancient dinosaurs, the tyrant lizards who had ruled the world long ago. He told him a little of the history of humanity, its wars and the ever-present march of technology. He told him of places and worlds that had never existed, that never could, worlds of fantasy or worlds far across the stars. He spoke of bravery, of honour, of cruelty, but far more importantly of cunning, curiosity and determination. He spoke of different species working together.

That was what had ignited Henry Wu’s ambition, all those years ago. That theme which ran through so many books across genres. Humans could see the Other and they could make a choice. They could choose to try and kill it, or they could choose to work with it. He had imagined intelligence - and if there were no aliens out there to be found he, Henry Wu, would create the intelligent allies for humanity that Earth had never had and he would give them the tools to fight back if humanity made the wrong decision. Allies, or the new masters of the earth. 

Henry told Aurelius those same stories now. He spoke of dragons. 

\----

Henry had continued to spend as much time with Aurelius as he could, although occasionally he was forced away by the demands of work. When he couldn’t be there he made sure that the growing raptor had plenty to do. Enrichment, as Grady’s video logs stated over and over again, was key. He could not be certain that Aurelius’ mental development would follow the same path as that of a human’s but there was nothing else to go on. Henry had purchased a large number of toys suitable for babies and toddlers and left it up to his child to decide which he preferred. 

Aurelius appeared to enjoy soft toys if the attention he showed them was anything to go by, but his teeth and claws soon ripped the fabric to shreds no matter how careful he was with them. Plastic stood up a little better. At this stage he appeared most interested in stacking things up and knocking them down, although a little robotic dog designed to do backflips soon found a different role in being pounced upon or snatched from the air mid-leap. 

Naturally Aurelius had hunting instincts, and it only made good sense to train them too. Henry found one day entirely accidentally that he had a cat’s love for a laser pointer, although he could equally see from the way Aurelius followed the line of light back to its source that it wasn’t because he was fooled by it in the way that a cat was. 

He was vocal too, which Henry had expected. He snarled, growled and barked like his cousins the raptors, but he mimicked as well whether it was the beeps of a toy or some stumbling attempts at Henry’s own words something like a child’s babbling. Wu was simply glad that part of the genes had taken. He had given Aurelius a parrot’s voice-box albeit on a larger scale, knowing that the range of sounds he would be able to copy would be wider than that of a human as a result. 

It seemed to be working. And in the end it was fitting that for so much as Henry talked about them, ‘dragon’ was Aurelius’ first word. 

His progress after that was swift and soon he had mastered a small vocabulary, although like any toddler ‘no’ seemed to be his favourite. Soon after, the questions followed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry Wu tries his best to be a good parent. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the attributes of children.

At first the questions that Aurelius asked were ones that on the surface were simple enough. He was naturally curious about the world around him, what things were made of, what they did and why. Since his hatching Wu had kept him for the most part in the upper level laboratories where he could pass his books off as for his own amusement and claim the toys as mere experiment. As a result the world Aurelius was growing up in was one full of many things that could catch the interest of a growing child; computer stacks, monitors, scientific equipment, cylinders full of chemical substrates, wire and cables and much more. He got into everything, and wanted to know every tiny detail about all of it.

“What is this?” Aurelius would ask, dragging his claws across a metal tray, tilting it back and forth to see his reflection in it, flipping it over to better understand its shape. Or “What do these do?” when prodding at a set of pipettes, test tubes and embryonic cylinders. Always wishing to encourage learning, Henry did his best to answer these questions as accurately as he could while still being simple enough, but it was easy to get into a chain of ‘why’ which had no end to it. 

If only children had the learning, patience and experience to go with their incessant curiosity, he reflected, they would make the perfect scientists. 

Henry had not given much consideration to the use of television as an educational tool, feeling that it held less to offer in that regard than the books or his own presence, but he soon thought it might be necessary to change his mind about that simply to have a little peace and quiet. 

When Aurelius’ questions were merely about his environment Henry never had any concern about answering them. When he turned his attention to other matters however Wu felt the unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation of guilt. 

“Where do you go sometimes?” Aurelius asked him about his occasional brief absences to the mansion upstairs, and Henry had to find the words to explain to him that the small world around him was not all that there was in existence, that at least some of the things described in his tales were real rather than merely fantasy. 

“Could I come with you?” was the inevitable next question. “I want to see.”

Henry knelt down on the floor next to Aurelius and took his son’s scaled face in his hands. “It would be dangerous for you to go,” he told him. He could see the shape of the discussion they would have to have now, one he had hoped to put off. He could see too that this would just be the first of many on the topic. 

“Dangerous? Why?” Aurelius asked. 

“You know that you and I do not look alike,” Henry said. Aurelius nodded, putting his hand momentarily against Wu’s in unnecessary comparison. 

“Are we meant to?”

“No,” Henry replied. “You are made not just from me but from many others as well. You’ve seen them; I have shown you them in your books.” He could see the connection, the understanding, being made in his child’s eyes. “The world is a much bigger place than this, and it is full of humans, people who look like me. They are afraid of those like you. Most of those they have known have been wild animals who don’t think like you do, or talk like you do.”

“But if I talk to them…”

Henry shook him lightly, knowing he had to emphasise this point. “They are not clever like you and I. They will not understand, and they will be afraid of what they don’t understand. If they know what you are they will take you away from me and you will be locked up forever.”

He could see Aurelius mulling this over. “But I’m locked up now,” he said.

“Not forever,” Henry assured him. “For now it’s safer that others either think you are an animal, or they don’t know that you exist at all. But later, when you are stronger, when you have learned all that I have to teach you and I can make you brothers and sisters to stand by your side… then it doesn’t matter if they fear you. You will be too strong for them to hurt, and their fear will become respect.”

It was easy to speak as though his hope was something inevitable. There were times when he had wondered if his dream would all come to nothing. But Henry Wu had never been a man to pay much heed to doubt. 

It was enough to make Aurelius stop asking to leave the lab with him, but it opened the floodgates to questions about the outside world and what it was like. When Henry read to him, he now took more time to explain what parts of a novel depicted the way things were or had been, and the parts which were made up entirely. When words were not quite enough and he resorted to bringing up Youtube on the lab computers, it was not long before Aurelius was pleading at every opportunity to see more. 

Henry gave in to the inevitable. He set up one of the large screens in a side room for Aurelius and prepared a list of shows he thought appropriately educational for him to watch, mixing documentaries with Sesame Street and similar children’s fare. 

Thus for a span there was quiet - at least until Aurelius came back with even more questions. Wu reminded himself that this was what he’d wanted, and set about answering them.

\----

“I’d like to see how the asset is doing.”

Henry managed to conceal his irritation at Eli’s request. He had been aware that he couldn’t keep this man away from the lab forever simply by holding their meetings upstairs. Nor could he afford to look as though he were making excuses. 

“I’m agreeable to set a date and a time,” he said, folding his hands together on his lap. They were in Eli’s office in the mansion, the hub from which he managed the Lockwood estate and fortune. “I’m sure you are a busy man. I have some tests running that will require my attention once we’re finished here today, but after that I can arrange my work around yours.” The appeal of flattery and some degree of subservience worked, as it usually did on Wu’s employers. He was practised at this after many years with InGen. 

“Sure.” Eli flipped through his diary with a slightly distracted air. “Tomorrow late, let’s say seven?”

Henry nodded. It would be time enough to set things up for Aurelius’ first real test. 

“Anything else I need to know about?” Eli asked. 

“Not at all,” Henry said smoothly, rising. “I look forward to your visit.”

He left the office and took the elevator down to the bottom level. He caught sight of the clone-child briefly as he walked through the exhibition hall, lurking in the plastic fronds of ancient plants behind glass and watching as he passed by. He let her believe herself unnoticed and headed down. 

Aurelius looked up when he entered the lab. He had been lying on his side watching a documentary about predators, and his claws twitched as on screen a lioness lunged for an antelope. 

“We will have a guest tomorrow,” Henry told him. He noted almost with surprise how big Aurelius was getting - the size now of one of Grady’s raptors. It was doing him no good to be cooped up in the lab like this, for all he could get up to good speed in a run around the upper catwalk. It wasn’t the exercise he ought to be getting - he needed to be able to build his strength. Another puzzle for him to solve. 

“The one who thinks he owns me?” Aurelius asked. Talons flexed. 

“Yes,” Henry said. “He believes I am attempting to train you, as in those videos I have shown you.”

“Of my cousins, yes,” Aurelius replied, a little irritated in tone. “I know what I’m meant to do, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to jump around for treats. I’m not a dog.”

“It will be brief.”

Aurelius flicked his tail once, twice, and went back to watching television. Henry half expected a child’s whine of ‘it’s not fair’, and waited to answer it, but Aurelius said nothing. Let him sulk then; at his young age with so many human genes built into his brain it was natural. Henry trusted that he knew what to do, and was not stubborn or foolish enough to refuse.

\----

The next evening came, and Henry ushered Aurelius into one of the side pens in plenty of time - “Test subjects do not have the run of the place Aurelius,” he had told him, when they had discussed this before. Eli came down the elevator just on time, though checking his watch and appearing harassed. 

“Where is it then?” he asked. 

“Here,” Henry told him, allowing nothing to show on his face. He despised this man, but that was not an unfamiliar sensation. He ushered Eli through into a room next to the one Aurelius now occupied. From this viewing chamber Aurelius certainly made an impressive sight, his dark scales lit to advantage by the bright electric light and the golden stripe along his side glowing. He snarled at the one-way mirror and paced. 

“It sure is something,” Eli said. His expression was pure avarice. Like so many before he was blind to the potential that lay before him. “And the training, how is that going?”

“It appears to be going as well as might be expected,” Henry said. “A demonstration perhaps?”

Eli nodded. Seeing Aurelius in the flesh appeared to have caught his attention despite whatever else might be on his mind. “It looks utterly ferocious,” he said. “Amazing that these things can be trained, but I suppose it’s like a wolf or a bird of prey or something. The military might have pretended to drop InGen after the Isla Nublar fiasco but they’re still champing at the bit for a working prototype. They’ll pay through the nose for this once it’s ready.”

Henry made a non-commital noise as he led Eli back out and into the large empty room which was meant to be the ‘training room’. It had been modeled on Grady’s juvenile raptor pen from Jurassic World. Henry had never had cause to use it before now. He threw a switch on the wall by the door that opened the gate between Aurelius and the pair of them. Next to him Eli let out a nervous laugh. 

“You sure this is safe?” he asked, looking as though he was regretting his decision. Henry had little patience for him. 

“Perfectly so,” he said, waiting for Aurelius to join them. His son was certainly playing his part well, lifting his head to sniff the air as he stalked through. He paused in front of them, down on all fours and waiting to see what Henry would do. 

“Observe,” Wu said, and began to run through the agreed set of exercises which he did have to admit were, yes, somewhat doglike. Sit, stay, wait to eat, fetch that, ‘speak’ - although that meant simply growl - and finally attack the CPR dummy he had lying in a corner for this purpose. 

It was obvious that Aurelius still resented having to do this, and Henry could not blame him for that. Things seemed to be going smoothly for all that however, until the very last command. As the last syllable of ‘attack’ left Henry’s mouth he saw the mischievous glint in his child’s eyes as his head turned towards the dummy and then back - at the man standing behind his shoulder. 

Henry didn’t have time to do anything before Aurelius lunged at Eli. Eli ducked, screaming, and six inch talons clawed into the forest mural painting the wall leaving long scars in the plaster. Aurelius snarled, and snapped his maw shut scant inches from Eli’s head. The man was scrabbling for the door, and Henry did his best to put himself in between them, glaring at Aurelius. 

“Stop this!” he shouted, his arms spread wide, but whatever wild idea was in his son’s head being reprimanded was not going to shake it. 

Eli made it to the door, hit the release and opened it with a hiss of hydraulics, then forced it closed behind him. 

It this had been a different situation the man would have left him in here to die, Henry thought to himself coldly. Although he could hardly blame him for having strong instincts of self-preservation. From the window in the door he could see that Eli had run for the elevator and was even now pressing repeatedly at the button to bring it down. 

“Just what do you think you’re _doing_?” he demanded of Aurelius. 

“Making sure I never have to bow and scrape to someone like _him_ again,” Aurelius replied with venomous hate. “He smells of… of fear and… weakness!” His tail lashed and his sickle-claw tapped against the concrete floor. His words came as a surprise, but perhaps they should not have. Aurelius had the instincts of a predator coded in his genes. 

“Weak he may be, but he is the one who ensures that you are fed and that this facility keeps working,” Henry told him. “You have no idea of the consequence of what you have just done. You have no idea how hard I will have to work to convince him you are worth keeping around!”

Aurelius stilled. When he spoke his voice was small and hesitant. “Are you going to let him kill me?” 

“No! Never.” If it came to it then Aurelius could defend himself, and the pair of them would have to make a run for it. It would mean the end of the dream, and potentially simply death deferred, but it wasn’t possible to explain all of that to Aurelius right now. Not when he had to go and do what damage control he could. 

“We will talk about this later,” he said, “I promise. I need to talk to Eli.” When he got outside the room Eli and the elevator were both gone, so Henry made for the stairs, already marshalling his arguments. He simply hoped Aurelius hadn’t ruined everything for both of them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry has managed to win a reprieve from Eli Mills, but keeping Aurelius occupied is an ever harder task.

Henry found Eli sitting on the floor of the exhibition hall not far from the elevator, slumped against the wall and still breathing hard. His face was pale and there was a faint tremor in his shoulders. Less than ideal. Henry walked to stand next to him and waited to be noticed. After some while, Eli looked up. 

He blinked several times as though finding it hard to believe what he was seeing. “You’re… still alive,” he said, stating the obvious. Henry wondered if he would despise this man less if he knew this excess of fear was justified, as it had been with the raptors or with the Indominus. He should look less harshly on ignorance. 

“The training was apparently not entirely without merit,” he said. 

Eli visibly pulled himself together, and stood up on shaking legs, leaning against the wall for balance. “Yes, well,” he said, “not exactly all you promised me, was it?”

“Yes, I’m not entirely sure what went wrong,” Henry said, not _entirely_ a lie. He understood Aurelius’ motives, he simply believed his son should have been smarter than to act without fully thinking through the consequences. “It will bear more study.”

“More study?” Eli said incredulously. “That _thing_ is dangerous.”

“Not to me,” Henry pointed out. “Perhaps it imprinted on me like the raptors did with Grady.”

“Grady’s raptors obeyed him. I’ve seen the videos - _he_ would have been able to call them off.”

“I am a scientist,” Wu said, needing no pretense to display the deep irritation he was genuinely feeling. “Not a specialist in behaviour. I suspect some kind of variable I’m overlooking. I’m sure with further study I will be able to ascertain what that variable is and correct it.”

“With how much delay?” Eli demanded. “This specimen isn’t the tractable asset you promised me. We should cut our losses, scrap it, and start again from the beginning.”

A cold, unpleasant shock of emotion ran down Henry’s spine. Fear. He cleared his throat and spoke with a suddenly dry mouth. “If we do that we lose the chance to know where we went wrong. There’s no guarantee the same mistake won’t be made again. And he is still growing - the plasticity of the brain…”

Eli waved a hand at him, already impatient. As the time passed he regained more and more of his blustering false-confidence. “Okay, okay, I get your point. You think you can still get something useful out of the thing.”

“I still have some hope for military applications,” Henry said, using this as the trump card he knew it was. “We can look into less sophisticated training methods.”

“Yeah, tell me when you can show me something that won’t try and kill me,” Eli said. “And show me quickly or I don’t care how much that beast cost, I want it dead.” He started to stride away, the conversation finished in his mind. Wu watched him go with cold hatred and felt a sudden stab of kindred with his son. He too loathed bowing and scraping to those lesser than him, without a fraction of his intelligence and vision. Perhaps Aurelius had too much of Henry in him, yoked to those predator’s instincts. 

He would try not to be too harsh with Aurelius he decided, inputting the code for the elevator. He had managed Eli’s reaction well enough, and they would simply have to come up with something else less offensive to his child’s sensibilities. 

\----

Aurelius was waiting for him downstairs. Although he did not come out and ask how things had gone his expression of wordless expectation was question enough. 

“Think yourself lucky,” Henry told him, not masking his disapproval. “I was able to placate Mr Mills - this time.”

Aurelius tapped his claws against the floor. “That’s good,” he said in a quiet voice. 

“This is a reprieve, not forgiveness,” Henry said. “He will be expecting something from us that will make him believe there is still profit for him in you. Don’t hiss,” he added as Aurelius did just that. “We’ll think of something less demeaning for you.”

“I promise I’ll try better next time. And I won’t try to eat him.”

Henry paused. “I would not make you promise that,” he said. “It may come to pass that you need to fight to preserve your own life, and then you will have to kill humans. Mr Mills would likely be one of them in that scenario. All that I ask is that you think harder about the consequences of your own actions.”

Aurelius nodded meekly. 

“You are still naive about human nature Aurelius,” Henry said, knowing this could be no fault but his own. The stories he had told his son thus far had always been ones where humans and other intelligences worked together, be they alien, artificial or animal. He had avoided those that portrayed conflict as inevitable because he had not wanted to prejudice Aurelius against Wu’s own species. He had failed to anticipate that this would erode any sense of threat Henry’s own warnings might have provided. 

In future he would no longer omit such works. The examples would serve to reinforce this as a learning experience. 

“What do you think we should do then?” Aurelius asked him. “About Mr Mills I mean.”

“I shall think about it,” Henry said, “and you should do so as well. Perhaps you will come up with something that suits you better.”

\----

A little over a week later Henry had considered several options to solve their problem with Eli, but in the end the answer came from Aurelius rather than himself. His son came over to him one morning with a laser pointer clutched delicately in his mouth, one of those he still amused himself playing with occasionally. He dropped it on the table and stopped it from rolling away with a claw-tip. 

“I was thinking,” Aurelius said, “that man believes I’m just an animal right? Well I’ve seen videos of human pet animals hunting these. What if we say you’ve trained me to attack this dot - or rather, whoever it is pointing at? ”

A wave of pride rose up in Henry’s chest. “An elegant solution,” he said, smiling. “It will perhaps need a little experimentation to find the best way of presenting it to Mr Mills, but this is very well done.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “And when exactly did you see any cat videos? I don’t recall putting that on your playlist.”

Aurelius’ eyes were wide with innocence. “I’m sure you showed them to me,” he said. “Back, oh, months ago.”

Henry had no memory of ever doing such a thing - but equally he could not say for certain that he had not. He gave Aurelius a look of suspicion but chose not to press the point right now. He hadn’t thought Aurelius was familiar enough with technology to work out how to use any programs other than the video player he usually used, which wasn’t even getting into the physical limitations of his sizeable talons. Aurelius was clever though, and still had a child’s naturally experimental way of learning. It was a possibility. 

He was going to have to check if Aurelius had found out about the internet - and if so they were going to need to have a discussion about computer safety and child-appropriate filters. 

\----

To Henry’s exasperation and grudging respect, Aurelius did appear to have worked out that computers could be used for more than watching educational videos. However judging by the browser history he had been using the internet to ask questions about topics that came up in what he _ought_ to have been watching; search topics included ‘what are cookies?’, ‘what is a cookie _for eating_ ’ - the previous one must have turned up mostly the computer meaning of the term - ‘human pets’ - Henry closed his eyes briefly hoping that hadn’t turned up anything too inappropriate - ‘ are cats nice?’, ‘laser pointers’, ‘what does $ mean’, ‘laser pointer video’, ‘hunting for beginners’, ‘hunting for animals’, ‘animals hunting’, and so on. 

This had apparently been going on for a while. Henry could hardly condemn his son’s curiosity or the clear spirit of enquiry rather than simply using his newfound freedom for simple entertainment purposes - although for a predatory creature such as Aurelius hunting videos were arguably entertainment. So far it didn’t seem that he had discovered anything too troubling, but that couldn’t last. He would have to put some filtering software into place. 

First though he had to talk to Aurelius. 

When Henry called his son through and Aurelius saw the open browser history he froze in place for a moment. “Oh, that,” he said, clearly trying to keep his voice light and unconcerned. 

“I’m not angry at you Aurelius,” Henry told him. “I merely want to know why you felt you should keep this from me.”

Aurelius tapped the talons of his hands against the floor. His body-language was in many ways dissimilar from that of humans but this much usually meant he was nervous or agitated in some way. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was secret, and you hadn’t told me about it, so I thought it wasn’t allowed.”

“Yet you have been using it anyway,” Henry pointed out. 

Tap, tap, tap. “Yes,” Aurelius admitted. “It was too interesting.”

“If you had spoken to me about this I would have have been happy to show you how to use the internet appropriately,” Henry said. He had always experienced disappointment as a better goad to good behaviour than anger when he was a child, and hoped this would prove the same for his own son. “There are some parts of the internet that are not good places, the more so for someone your age.”

“I’m old enough,” Aurelius objected. 

“Old enough for what, do you imagine?” Henry asked him. “You certainly haven’t finished growing for one thing; that’s more than enough evidence that you aren’t yet mature.”

“I’m mature,” Aurelius said under his breath, but quietened at a stern look. 

“I could have also helped answer any questions you had about what you found,” Henry said. “And going forward I won’t stop you using this, but I do expect you to talk to me about what you’re looking at.”

“Okay fine,” Aurelius said, with a breathy noise that was his version of a sigh. “I’m sorry for not telling you what I was doing.” He paused. “Actually, I do have one question.”

Henry nodded for him to go ahead. 

“What’s PETA and why do they hate fun?”

\----

After they had worked and refined the laser targeting concept to a point where Wu felt happy with it, he presented the idea to Eli Mills. Eli was reasonably enthusiastic about it, but declined any kind of demonstration until he felt that Henry had ‘worked out the kinks’. This suited him well enough. He had his hands full with Aurelius whose physical energy was starting to match his mental energy. It was hard enough to exhaust him when it was only about answering questions, but as his son continued to grow it became ever clearer that he was not getting the exercise he needed down in the lab. 

Henry had originally considered persuading Eli to allow him to take Aurelius out for ‘training exercises’ in the grounds, but that had been predicated on Eli believing him to be easily controllable. There was no possibility of him agreeing to such a thing now. 

When he got back downstairs Aurelius was waiting for him with one of his books. 

“These creatures,” Aurelius said, dragging the tip of a claw over the picture of a dragon on the front of the book. “They have wings, do they not?” His voice had deepened as he continued to grow, and indeed he was bigger than any of the raptors had been, standing nearly as tall as Wu himself. “Will I grow them some day?”

“I am afraid not,” Henry told him, mildly amused. He supposed he had made no secret of the inspiration for his life’s work, and Aurelius was merely drawing potential conclusions from that. “My experiments in that regard were not particularly successful. It is a problem I am still working on, but for now my son I am afraid you must be content to be a wyrm.”

Aurelius snorted lightly. This was a sound of amusement usually, but there was a darker edge to it now. “You made me to be like them,” he said. “Are you disappointed that I am not?”

“How could I be disappointed in you,” Henry was quick to reassure him. “I might better ask if you are disappointed in me. I built you Aurelius, and each part is my design. The failings then are mine if you wish I had tried harder to give you wings.”

“Down here I feel I would be worse for having them,” Aurelius said. Henry took his point, and the one he was trying to make. 

“Perhaps you should have considered that before pretending to be an uncontrollable beast,” he said, then relented a little. It was unfair of him to bring up reminders of what could not now be changed. “You will not be able to leave here with the permission of Mr Mills.”

“But without his permission? If he doesn’t know?” 

Aurelius had drawn the correct conclusion. “It will not be easy for you to leave unnoticed,” Henry warned him. From a merely mechanical point of view there were no great obstacles; it was not hard to get out. There were multiple holding cages down here that had once held the test animals he, Hammond and Lockwood had resurrected in the earliest days of the Jurassic Park project. Each of them opened at the rear to a lorry loading bay, as well as the large emergency doors at the far end of the lab which exited via a ramp to the side of the mansion. He could have taken Aurelius out by either of those routes if it were not for the security cameras blanketing the mansion’s exterior. 

There were cameras in the lab as well, but Henry had control of that footage. The feed from the exterior cameras was observed by one of Eli’s employees, someone who undoubtedly did not know what went on far beneath their feet. 

“I’m sure I could sneak out,” Aurelius said confidently. 

“Aurelius, do you recall the creature I showed you, the Indominous Rex?” Henry asked. His son nodded. “Some of her genes are in you as well,” he continued. “She had certain abilities which would be very useful in a situation like this. It was some while into her growth before she became aware of them or I assume could consciously control them. I do wonder if you have the same abilities.”

Aurelius gave him a look of keen curiosity, his head cocked to one side. “What kind of abilities?”

“She could control her temperature and match it to the heat of her surroundings, and she could change her colour to camouflage.” 

Aurelius looked down at himself, at the inky dark scales and the band of gold along his flank. He spent a few moments deep in thought. “I don’t have any idea how to do that,” he said. “I don’t know if I could.”

“I imagine it was a matter of trial and error for her as well. Perhaps you could spend some time experimenting,” Henry suggested. 

Aurelius nodded. “Anything to get out of here for a bit,” he said, with clear determination.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aurelius finally tastes freedom, of a sort. The path to true freedom is still a long one, but the first steps are now being taken.

Aurelius spent the next few days studying videos of octopi and cuttlefish making full use of their chromatophores. He often stared down at himself in deep concentration trying to do the same, but unsure how he was supposed to. After a week however, placing his arm against a bright background he was able to slowly leach the black out of his skin and match quite well the colour he was lying against. 

Naturally he was eager to show this off, and Henry made no secret of his own approval. He wanted Aurelius to be able to leave this place when he needed to, and that was not even mentioning how important the ability to camouflage might be in the future once his son was full grown. Wu had only ever intended to stay beholden to others until his ultimate creations were complete and numerous enough to survive the world on their own. That day was coming ever nearer, and with it the choice humankind would have to make - to welcome Aurelius and his siblings as friends and cousins of their own intelligence, or to turn against them. 

If it were the later choice, then the Indoraptors would have to carve out their own place in the world. 

This initial change wasn’t enough for Aurelius to be able to fool the cameras, but once he had figured out the trick of it his progress was swift and smooth. Before long he was changing his colour entirely, and then he moved on to mastering patterns and some attempt at textures. When he was able to hide himself well enough in the lab that Henry himself had to take some time to find him despite knowing that he was there, Wu decided that he was ready. 

“I can go out?” Aurelius asked him, almost bouncing with excitement. “Finally?”

“It cannot be for long,” Henry cautioned him. “Not at first. It will raise suspicion if I am not here in the laboratory for too long.”

“Surely you don’t have to stay with me the whole time?” Aurelius asked, his tail flicking back and forth. “I’m sure no-one will see me out there.”

“I need to show you were it is and is not safe to go,” Henry said, “besides which, this ability is still very new to you. Please have a little caution.”

Aurelius settled a little. Henry hoped he was remembering the lesson of his last reckless act. “Now,” Henry continued, “match yourself to your surroundings and follow me.”

Aurelius faded from view. It was astonishing to watch even from this close distance, altered colour gradually rippling over him blurring his outline and making him a part of the surroundings. Satisfied, Henry turned and led his son down to the main hall of the lab. From there they went out through the rear of one of the old and disused cages into a long loading bay with a row of sliding doors on one side. When this space had still been in regular use trucks had been able to pull up here to unload their cargo - mostly equipment, necessary supplies, food for the experiments of the time, or to collect and dispose of the ones who had not made it. Henry went to one of the doors, unlocked it, and forced it up with a grating rattle. It was stiff with rust, but it moved enough to make a space that Aurelius would fit through. 

Fresh air blew in bringing the scent of nature with it. Petrichor of wet earth, tree sap, green and growing things. He heard Aurelius take deep, snorting breaths behind him. This was the first time his son had ever experienced something like this and Henry felt a momentary pang of sadness. Yet it could have been no other way. 

Outside it was still light, but the sun was low in the sky and long shadows stretched out over the loose gravel of the parking bay in front of them. Henry took the steps down, but Aurelius simply leapt, his claws scrabbling in the gravel. He was briefly visible as he changed his colors again, his head turning to take note of the position of the CCTV cameras. Not a slip long enough to be noticed, or at least Henry hoped not. 

“This… this is amazing,” Aurelius said quietly. Ahead of them was forest, with the road curving away to the left to join the one leading to the front of the mansion. The wind swayed the branches of the tall pines and the bushes beneath them. There was a faint sound of birdsong in the distance. Aurelius listened to it for a moment and then lifted his head to call back - a perfect mimicry. For a minute or two he and the bird sang back and forth before he lowered his head again and laughed. 

“Come on,” Henry said gently. There was a deep fondness spreading through him in response to his son’s wonder. This was what Aurelius should have been able to experience from the start. It had been denied him. Henry would work to make sure it would not be denied to those who came after. “Into the woods.”

There was no path into the forest from here as such, but Henry pushed past the bushes easily enough until they were under a spreading canopy which stole too much light for heavy ground cover. Leaves rustled as Aurelius followed him, and then they were standing together in a quiet, secret place. There was no-one else around. 

“I want to run,” Aurelius said, speaking in a distracted way. 

“Go,” Henry urged him. “You have my permission.”

Aurelius needed nothing more. Henry felt the wind as he passed by him, and then he was a dark shape dappled by light, moving too fast for utter camouflage but taking on countershading and a tiger’s stripes that broke up his form amongst the boles of trees. Wu soon lost track of him and could not stop a little worry seeping into his heart even though there was little reason for it. Satisfaction was quick to win out over it however. This was what Aurelius needed. 

\----

Their trips out to the large and well-forested grounds of the Lockwood estate were a regular occurrence after that. Henry always arranged them for the end of the day when he was no longer technically ‘on the clock’ from a research and development capacity, although since half of what he was being paid to do was raise Aurelius he was never truly off duty. The groundskeepers managing the woodland never stayed that late in the day however, and although the clone Maise occasionally ran around the woods herself she was always called back inside by that time. Henry and Aurelius had the place to themselves. 

The effect of the exercise was already starting to tell. Aurelius kept on growing and he was beginning to look more toned, his muscles more developed. There had been a slight sense of flabbiness to him despite his carefully calculated diet, but that was soon gone. He was not a bulky carnivore like the tyrannosaur but lithe and quick like the other raptors, and that was certainly evident in how he moved. He even managed to find the opportunity to hone his hunting skills, as Henry found out the first time he returned from a run with a small deer clutched in his teeth. 

Aurelius had been so proud of himself that Henry hadn’t the heart to do anything other than congratulate him, and after that he always brought back his kills to show them off. 

The local wildlife soon learned to steer well clear of the Lockwood estate, and Aurelius was mostly disappointed in his hunting after that, constrained as he was by Wu’s warnings to remain within the boundary fences and walls. 

For his own part Henry continued his research. As he had said to Aurelius, he was still working on some kind of winged morph whether quadrupedal or hexapodal for a future child, but it seemed that too many of the other advantageous genetic adaptations would have to be sacrificed for it to really be worth it. The survival benefit of flight was in any case not so useful in this age of drones and jets and radar. Besides that his test animals had not tended to do well from a health perspective either. 

The work was sufficient to mollify Eli however, in addition to some videos he and Aurelius had created to demonstrate the new ‘training’ he had supposedly created. It was enough to make him believe Wu was still attempting to synthesise a more useful soldier than Aurelius had proved to be. Henry had hoped to be able to have another batch of Indoraptor eggs developing by now in his original plan, but Eli was too wary to go ahead with that. A mere setback, that was all. Eli would come around eventually, and if he did not then it would not be the first time that Henry had gone behind an employer’s back. 

Naturally amongst all this Aurelius had more questions. 

“Tell me more exactly what a soldier is, in the real world,” Aurelius asked him one day. Henry pushed his chair back from the desk where he had been reviewing gene sequences, wondering what had brought this on. “You’ve said Mr Mills wanted a ‘military application’ - he wants dinosaur soldiers, right?”

“Soldier implies a level of agency he does not believe you to have,” Henry said while he considered how to answer the primary question. “And he would not be particular about your role on the battlefield or otherwise, so long as the military would pay good money for you. He does not care what use they would put you to afterwards.”

Aurelius snarled quietly. “People fight a lot in stories,” he said. “For lots of reasons, it seems. But is that the same outside of books?”

“Many of the reasons are the same,” Henry said. “Although it is not common for wars to be fought to decide the fate of the whole world as it sometimes is in these tales. Countries fight to defend themselves or to achieve some kind of goal. An individual soldier may serve for love of their country, because they believe in the cause that a war is for, for the love of fighting itself, or because they see little other option for their life. Other countries still force their citizens to join their military, but this one has not done so for a number of years.”

“They would like to force me,” Aurelius said. With his crocodilian maw he could not bare his teeth like his raptor cousins, but he had a way of holding his jaws apart slightly that seemed to serve a similar purpose. 

“If they knew what you are, and believed forcing you was possible I am certain it would cross their minds,” Henry said. That was his belief in any case. “And perhaps some time far in the future you, your siblings or your children will fight for a country of your own free will, but I have little trust in the wisdom of this government when it comes to choosing how to react to your existence.”

Aurelius cocked his head in thought. “But isn’t the government in charge of all of the things in a country?”

“Usually,” Henry replied. 

“So if they try to imprison me, or you, or try to kill me… are we just all going to run? Where to?”

It was a topic which had been much on Henry’s mind as well over the years. “The bounds of this continent are vast,” he said. “Many parts of it have few people living there, and there are many places we could go to hide and continue our work in secret. There are many ways to find those who do not wish to be found, but they are designed to find humans who have needs that you do not have Aurelius.”

“I would like to live somewhere that isn’t here,” Aurelius confessed. “Somewhere that was like the woods outside, maybe. It’s nice there. Peaceful. All I really _need_ is to be able to hunt, but… Father you don’t eat the same things as me. You need all of this,” he gestured to the laboratory and all of its equipment that surrounded them, “to make more people like me. And I would miss the Internet. Are those the kinds of things the government could track?”

“Unfortunately so,” Henry said. “However it retreating to the wilderness of America ever proves necessary I hope it won’t be just you and me Aurelius. If there are enough of your siblings starting to grow up then I will have no need to make you artificially.”

Aurelius tapped his claws in a slightly troubled way. “I’ve watched a lot of programs about endangered animals,” he said. “They usually don’t do so well if the population is too small, and surely Mr Mills isn’t going to let you make hundred and hundreds of raptors like me?”

“The issue is genetic diversity,” Henry told him. “It is not the number of animals _per se._ In the case of your siblings, I intend to make their genes as different from each other as I reasonably can. You will be related to each other only in the way that any human is related to the rest of humanity, or as a dog is to a wolf.”

“I suppose you’ve had plenty of time to think about this,” Aurelius said. “So let’s say there are more raptors, and we have to run. You didn’t answer what that would mean for you. You… would come with us, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, that was indeed the question. The smarter answer would be no, that it was not safe, that Aurelius and his kin had a higher chance at survival without him. But in this at least he found it much harder to consider the smart answer than he usually would. Henry could admit privately that it wasn’t just his affection for his son driving that. It was his own pride as well. His ambition could not be content with merely creating a new intelligence upon Earth, it had to continue to shape their development as well. He found it hard to consider his children leaving the nest, to use the metaphor, and achieving their own independence, guiding their own destiny. 

Self-knowledge did not in itself change the variables or alter that which it was aware of. “Of course I would come with you,” he told Aurelius. “I can give up the comforts of modern living if need be.”

He could see that his words pleased his son. “So then we wouldn’t have to fight the government or their soldiers,” Aurelius said. “I was worried about their weapons.” At Wu’s questioning look he admitted, “I may have been looking a few things up. If they wanted me to _be_ a weapon, I wanted to know what they thought a weapon was.”

Although he couldn’t be certain what Aurelius had seen, Henry found his worry entirely understandable. The Indominus Rex had fared well against the armed mercenaries InGen had hired, but her additional size gave her an advantage in skin-thickness, bone density, and sheer muscle mass that Aurelius did not have - although Wu calculated he should still be highly resistant to any kind of small-arms fire. 

The military would not be using small-arms fire, at least not after the first time it utterly failed to work. The modern battlefield had more than enough weapons capable of piercing even tank armour, and their biggest asset was simply numbers. No single creature no matter how biologically advantaged and augmented, could survive against the tide of bodies humanity could bring to bear. 

“Outright war should never be our goal,” Henry said. “It would be foolhardy in the extreme. Subtle methods, Aurelius. You must remain hidden, and while you are hidden, you must try and find humans who will work with you instead of against you.”

“Like you,” Aurelius said, bending his neck to nuzzle lightly against Henry’s shoulder. Wu reached up to scratch the scales at the corner of his jaw, the spot he had always liked the best. 

“Like me,” he said. “Humans have two competing instincts. They bond together in packs even with creatures that are not like them - dogs, cats, other beasts - and will protect them against outsiders. But they also have that way of splitting the world into us and them, into the social group and the outsiders. You will need to make yourself pack, rather than outsider.”

Aurelius nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Although I don’t know if it will be as easy as it is in books.”

“It is not always so easy in books either,” Henry reminded him. 

\----

After that conversation things did not change very much for some time. The events on Isla Nublar finally left the news cycle. Aurelius continued to grow until he eventually stopped at a very respectable length just shy of twenty-four feet. His time out in the grounds of the estate continued thankfully without incident. Henry continued to tweak his genetic profiles for the siblings he hoped to start work on as soon as the opportunity presented. It was there however that he began to run into problems. 

Henry had no shortage of genetic samples from animals or humans to choose from, but given the haste at which he had been forced to leave the facilities on Isla Nublar his choice of samples from dinosaurs was much smaller. Although Benjamin Lockwood had kept many of their original samples frozen on site here, all had been smaller herbivores for reasons of convenience and safety. He had some left over from Grady’s raptor project and from work on the Indominus, but he was uncomfortable with the lack of diversity and the relatively poor quality of some of what he did have. 

Given that Eli Mills had started pressing him to expand his facilities and to start work on a new military prototype, Henry decided to manipulate the situation to his own advantage. After all this had never failed as a strategy before now. 

Since Isla Sorna remained under government quarantine - a suspicious fact in of itself given that it was claimed no dinosaurs remained on the island - Isla Nublar was now the only potential source of high-quality living genetic samples. Attention had moved on from the island and the last of its employees had left, staying only long enough to see to the ongoing welfare of the species living there. Much as had been the case with Sorna, the dinosaurs of Jurassic World had been set loose from the restrictions of their paddocks in order to establish their own natural ecosystem until such time as a final decision could be made about what would happen to InGen, MasraniCorp, and the future of the park itself. 

Eli Mills was not the sort of man who would balk at being thought of as a poacher. It didn’t take much to convince him to hire men to return to the island and bring back the types of samples that Henry so dearly needed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Events accelerate towards the reawakening of the Isla Nublar volcano. Henry's plans must adapt as well.

“One Indominus Rex rib as requested,” Eli said, sweeping his hand in a flourish over the protective container lying on the desk in front of him. Henry bent over it slightly to examine it more closely. Everything appeared to be in order. “So,” Eli continued, “what do you plan to do with it?”

“I have some ideas for an improved beta version of the Indoraptor,” Henry said, not wishing to be too specific. “Did you manage to track down the surviving raptor?”

Eli shook his head, looking frustrated. “It’s a ‘wily son-of-a-bitch’, to quote the exact words my guy on the ground used. Couldn’t manage to track it. I’m not too keen to send them back either. It’s goddamn expensive. Hazard pay, insurance, transport, equipment… I’ve already had to shell out for some idiot that got himself eaten by the mosasaur in the lagoon.”

“Progress isn’t cheap,” Henry reminded him. “Think of this as an investment. I can guarantee you that it will pay off.”

“The capital simply isn’t available this year,” Eli said. It didn’t sound as though he was happy to be admitting it. “The Lockwood Foundation has options in a number of different companies aside from InGen, but the impact of the Jurassic World incident has been a bit more significant than I anticipated. We’re not in real trouble,” he was quick to add, which seemed more to reassure himself than Wu, “but it might take a while for our cash flow to stabilise enough to really invest the way I know we both want to.”

“I hope you lower your expectations of what _I_ will be able to achieve accordingly then,” Henry said coldly. Inwardly he was weighing up how this would benefit Aurelius and him. It was time that Aurelius could use to keep on learning about the world, time before the difficult choices would eventually have to be made, but it was also a delay before Henry would be able to start work on other Indoraptors. 

“Just focus on the prototype for now,” Eli said, grimacing a little. He was obviously still uncomfortable with Aurelius’ existence in the lab below. “Work out exactly what you’re going to do with the beta so that when we get the money you can start right away and get it _right_ this time.”

Henry nodded. “You’ll inform me when you’re ready to fund another expedition to the island, naturally,” he said. 

“Yeah, sure,” Eli said, waving him off. “You wanna get this specimen of yours down to the lab though and stop it cluttering up my desk?”

\----

“That looks interesting,” Aurelius said, as Henry carried the Indominus Rex rib segment into the lab. “What is it?”

“A source of genetic material,” Henry replied, setting it down on the table. Aurelius slunk closer to examine it with gentle claws. His size was such now that he found most of the upper level cramped, and he had to be constantly aware of his limbs and tail to stop any accidental damage to his surroundings. “This came from the Indominus Rex. One of your predecessors.”

“Hmm.” Aurelius poked around at it some more, but there was not much to be gained by simple visual inspection. “Did Mr Mills say anything interesting during your meeting?”

“He was unsuccessful in retrieving any samples from the living raptor there, and at present he doesn’t feel it is possible to try again.”

“That’s going to set your plan back,” Aurelius observed. It was difficult to tell how he felt about that. “Do you need the raptor alive to get her DNA? This isn’t alive.” He indicated the sample. 

“It isn’t necessary no,” Henry said. “But I have some concerns about the viability of the sample if it’s collected from a corpse. I have very limited access to raptor samples of any quality.” After the early disasters with the first Jurassic Park the US government had placed severe restrictions on the sale or import of fossil amber. Accessing new samples without a license was not legally possible. InGen’s current license had been suspended after Isla Nublar. 

“I would like to see a raptor in person,” Aurelius said wistfully. “I’ve seen so many videos of them growing up it’s almost like I know them. It’s such a pity most of them died.”

“They are not intelligent creatures like you are Aurelius.”

“No, but they’re not stupid either.” Aurelius sighed. “I suppose I’m curious as well. The Indominus was able to control the raptors, yes? So would I be able to? How did she do it exactly? Was she really communicating with them?”

This was a question that had occurred to Henry himself before, but he had always considered that it would be impossible to discover the answer. It was not a situation that could be repeated under experimental conditions, and what little video there was from that encounter was of poor quality from a research perspective. Yet Aurelius was right. It was a curious puzzle, and there was an opportunity here that he hadn’t considered. 

“I suppose it wouldn’t be hard for me to insist that they bring her to us alive,” he said slowly. “Then you could meet her and find out for yourself.”

Aurelius perked up with sudden excitement. “Could you father?” he said. “Please? It would be so marvellous.”

Henry smiled. Yes, why not? He needed that genetic sample, and if his son could win her over it opened up a new world of possibilities. Pets or bodyguards? He could just imagine it now. Each of his children running with a raptor pack at their heels, willing to give anything to protect them. Of course he was getting ahead of himself. There was no guarantee such an arrangement would fit in with the alliance with humans he had planned. 

Still it was a nice thing to contemplate. 

\----

Eli continued to fail to find the money. Henry continued to find reasons not to move on to a beta version of the Indoraptor - a step which would put Aurelius’ life in danger. Eli began to make noises about hiring more geneticists if Henry couldn’t do what he’d promised. Henry told him if he had the money to do that, then he had the money to bring him the raptor Blue. Tensions and temper grew between them, but that could not be helped. 

Not quite three years on from the Jurassic World incident scientists first in Costa Rica and then further afield began to pick up indications of seismic activity emanating from below Isla Nublar. A team was sent to investigate - cautious of the dinosaurs remaining on the island - and discovered that the volcano on the island which had created the Cincos Muertes chain millions of years ago had decided to wake up from its long dormancy. 

An eruption was inevitable in the future. Predicting an exact date was impossible, save that it was coming soon. Suddenly Isla Nublar was in the public eye once again, but for an entirely different reason. 

The public began asking what would happen to the dinosaurs. Various expert scientists answered the call to appear on the news with projections of the expected devastation. Death was their answer. If not in the initial pyroclastic flow then in the ashfall which would follow. The island was not big enough to escape that. It was likely that some of the other islands of the nearby Cincos Muertes chain would be affected by it as well, depending on weather conditions. 

“Something has to be done,” Aurelius said, who had been following all of this avidly. “If they were just left there to die… it would be such a waste!”

Henry had been feeling the same way. He had poured years of his life into the animals on that island and the idea that all of that would be swept away by the uncaring hand of the universe was simply untenable to him. It wasn’t just his pride speaking. From a scientific perspective it would take away their chance to learn more about these creatures, not to mention the financial waste given the resources that had gone into their creation. Legally it was questionable if they still remained the property of either InGen or MasraniCorp once they had been released from the bounds of the park proper, but Henry was aware MasraniCorp was still discussing internally what could be done to recoup the costs of Jurassic World. 

“I’m a little surprised to hear you talk like this,” Henry remarked. “It’s more altruistic than I had expected.”

“Oh well, think about it,” Aurelius said. “All those beautiful tasty herbivores just crisping up into nothing. And Blue as well. I still want to meet a raptor.” He turned back to the television. “I don’t know why they’re still discussing it,” he continued, clearly irritated. The channel had cut over to a round-table about the rights the dinosaurs possessed compared to other animals. “They need to go get the dinosaurs and move them somewhere else. It’s such a simple answer.” 

“There have always been plenty of opponents to the work that Hammond, Lockwood and I started decades ago,” Henry said mildly. The leave-it-alone reaction had not been of any surprise to him. It was always easier to do nothing when you were not personally affected, after all. 

“Fine, but you did it anyway,” Aurelius said. “It happened. They’re alive. Do they really want to try and undo it by letting them die?”

“Humans are rarely selfless,” Henry said. “Our kind have a tendency to hold grudges.”

Aurelius hissed softly to himself. “Can’t we do anything?” he asked. “Mr Mills is never going to fund a trip to somewhere that doesn’t exist!”

“I have a meeting to discuss that with him later today,” Henry said. “Given I’ve told him all our hopes rest on acquiring Grady’s last raptor alive.”

\----

“You’re not the only one who’s been going on at me about this whole volcano thing,” Eli complained. “Ben Lockwood won’t let it go either. Every time I see him he tells me about those ‘poor creatures’ trapped on Isla Nublar. I don’t know what he expects me to do about it!”

“He was always an enthusiast of nature when I knew him,” Henry said. Eli was clearly worked up. He could be easier to steer like this, but he could also be more erratic. 

“Yeah, I get that impression,” Eli said. “Told me once he helped Hammond because he always loved dinosaurs rather than because of the scientific curiousity - I mean, yeah, who doesn’t love dinosaurs in theory! It’s just the up close and personal that’s a damn sight different.”

“One thing in all of this is certain,” Henry said, guiding him back on topic. “We are running out of time.”

“I don’t have the money!” Eli shouted. “I can fund another expedition sure, but not if I want to keep your beast fed or pay for new ones. You think I can siphon as much as I want out of the Foundation’s funds? This isn’t a one man operation. We have accountants. I have to show Lockwood the books, and I have to hide the money from all this somewhere. That gets harder the more of it there is.”

“You’ve made all of this very clear to me in the past,” Henry said, holding up a hand to halt the tirade flowing from Eli’s mouth. “However if we don’t retrieve Blue now, the program may not succeed at all. That is the reality you are facing.”

Eli paced. He said nothing, deep in thought, arms hugged tight around his chest. “There has to be a way,” he said to himself. “Some way to make this work to our advantage.”

“The sooner we act the better,” Henry cautioned. “I’m aware that there are hearings in front of a senate committee about the government stepping in to relocate the animals. If they choose to do so…”

Eli scoffed. “Yeah right,” he said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on all that. I have connections. Those PETA wannabes have been petitioning hard but senators are a conservative bunch of people and no-one important is paying them to give a shit. If MasraniCorp thought they could get something out of it they might have petitioned the committee but from what I hear they’ve decided to cut their losses and make their insurance pay out as much as possible for the park and all the assets that were in it. They’ll make more if those assets go up in literal smoke.”

“Even if there is no government action that only prolongs our timeline for as long as the volcano waits to erupt,” Wu said. “That remains highly unpredictable.”

“I know, I know,” Eli said. “Let me think.” He continued to pace. 

Henry waited. After a while he said, “Has Mr Lockwood considered that a private action might be approved, if there is no will for a publically-funded one.”

Eli looked up, startled out of whatever likely fruitless path his thoughts had been on. “He mentioned it but not with much seriousness,” he said. “He would spend all his money on a damn dinosaur sanctuary if he had his own way, end up wasting everything…” He trailed off, then said slowly, “I have an idea.”

Henry did his best to look interested. If Eli’s idea wasn’t ‘do whatever Henry Wu says’ he didn’t care too much about it. 

“Maybe Lockwood was onto something, in his crazy way,” Eli said. “Sure the government is never going to pay out to rescue a bunch of monsters created by private science, but I bet they would have been happy for MasraniCorp to sort out their own mess if they didn’t have to pay anything for it themselves. I could spin it to them as the Lockwood estate wanting to pay its dues for our own part in creating this whole problem way back when.”

“You have the money for a rescue operation but not to retrieve one raptor?” Wu asked him skeptically. 

“No, no,” Eli said. “We’d go get a bunch of dinos yes, but not to dump them on some sanctuary somewhere. Like I was saying, everyone loves dinosaurs. They just can’t get their hands on them because no-one else has InGen’s patented de-extinction technology. Plus it never made sense for InGen to make dinosaurs for the retail market because the profit margins would never justify it. But now these animals are just wandering around in the wild not making anyone money. 

“We aren’t going to save these creatures,” he continued. “We’re going to sell them. That should more than cover the costs of the mission and give us a nice little untraceable lump sum to dump into R&D here.”

Henry found himself amazed. Eli had actually come up with a reasonable idea. He might have balked if he’d thought there was any chance of reverse-engineering the techniques of de-extinction from these living samples, but there wasn’t. It was certainly possible that these dinosaurs could be purchased by one of InGen’s rivals in the field of genetics - Monsanto had attempted to subourn several of his colleagues in the Jurassic World laboratories over the years for example - but the most they would be able to do was clone them. Eventually without a fresh DNA source this would result in genetic degradation and a useless product. 

Most of Henry’s _recent_ research existed only in his personal files anyway. He had no reason for concern. 

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” he said. “When do you imagine such an expedition could be put together?”

“I’ll have to run it past the old man first,” Eli said, grinning. “Given it’s everything he wanted though, he’s more likely to hug me than anything. After that… not more than a couple of weeks. We’ll need to get things ready here though for the sale. Hire people to guard the estate, get some folks on board to look after the creatures while we wait to sell them and make sure they’re fit for transport...”

“”Let’s discuss the details more later,” Henry said. “The sooner you convince Benjamin Lockwood the better.”

\----

The next time Henry exited from the elevator into the exhibition hall of the Lockwood manor, there was a new model sitting on a raised plinth behind the triceratops skull. He went over to examine it more closely. It appeared to show an island, although the scale of it was difficult to determine. By the shape - circular with a central lagoon - he supposed it to be an ancient volcanic formation, perhaps an eroded crater which now had a channel to the surrounding ocean. As he was bent over it he heard footsteps and looked up. Eli was approaching. 

“Oh, I guess you’ve seen this then,” he said, waving at the model. “Ben Lockwood wanted a visual of the island we’d be sending our rescues to.”

“Is it a real place?” Henry asked, straightening up. 

“Unfortunately so,” Eli said. “I had almost forgotten we owned it - I think we bought it so we could plonk a building down on it to call our international headquarters for tax reasons? Anyway, building’s still there, but no other kind of civilisation. Thought it would do well enough to fool Lockwood, and the government too. They’ll need to see we have a reasonable plan.”

“Won’t it become obvious when Mr Lockwood wants to visit and finds that there are no dinosaurs there?”

“He’s too old for long-distance travel,” Eli said dismissively. “We’ll mock up some footage from capturing the dinos on Nublar, splice it in with old stuff from Sorna. Should fool him long enough. He’s pretty ancient. Don’t expect he’s going to be around that much longer anyway.”

“And the government?” Henry asked.

“If they ever give enough of a shit to send an inspector we tell ‘em conditions weren’t right, the dinosaurs were all ill from volcanic ash, they all died, something along those lines. The plan right now is to let them die anyway, so why should they care?”

Henry was impressed despite himself. “You’ve clearly given this a lot of thought.”

“Yeah, I finally want to make some money off this dinosaur project,” Eli said. “The team’s hired and all ready to go. I plan to send them out once I get the okay from the senate committee and get things set up with this high-powered black market auctioneer I know. I have an idea as well to make sure we get your raptor this time as well. You remember Claire Dearing.”

“I worked for her for years,” Henry said. 

“Yeah, she’s working for the ‘Save the Dinosaur’ lobby now,” Eli continued. “I thought we could get her on board, and she might be able to track down Owen Grady. He kinda dropped off the grid after Isla Nublar. If we can get him though, he’ll be able to track down that raptor faster than anyone, right?”

“I’d imagine so,” Henry said. Things were starting to look up. There was a good chance now that he would have Blue before long, and then he could go straight to working on another set of Indoraptors. If Eli tried to press the point about getting rid of Aurelius then they would leave along with the eggs, but Henry would feel better about it with a raptor along to help guard them, wherever they went. 

In a way he was almost disappointed they wouldn’t be relocating operations to this new island. He had always enjoyed the idea of a secret island lair since he was young, although neither Sorna nor Nublar had exactly been that. He usually hated it when anyone made reference to Doctor Moreau - and that was an insult that had been leveled at him a number of times - but in that one respect at least he would have been glad to step into the role. 

It looked like it wasn’t to be however. There would be no islands this time. Just the state of California, and whatever wilderness they might need to find in it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night of the auction arrives, and Aurelius meets an unusual individual.

“Preliminary operations on the island are going well,” Eli said. He looked relaxed, but there was still tension held taut across his shoulders. “We’ve managed to locate a number of prime specimens from the herbivore herds, and the ground team are prepping transport arrangements for them.”

“And the carnivores?” Henry asked, although there was only one carnivore that he was truly concerned about. 

“A bit harder to pin down,” Eli admitted. “But if they can’t manage it before Claire Dearing and her group get there, she’ll activate the tracker system and we can get them that way. They’re going to be our big ticket items, so we need to collect as many of them as we can. Wheatley reports he almost managed to dart a juvenile Allosaurus yesterday, but they calculated the tranq dose too low and it ran off.”

“What about the raptor?”

Eli winced ever so slightly. “No real sign of her,” he said. “They’ve found some kills with sickle-claw wounds so they know she’s still alive, but no spoor and no tracks.” He paused. “Are you sure you need her? Alive? We know roughly where the bodies of two of Grady’s other raptors were disposed of, we could probably bring you back a sample like we did with the Indominus…”

“No,” Henry replied coldly, suppressing his irritation. He decided to bring out the argument he’d been saving - it was scientifically dubious but Eli was not knowledgeable enough to pick up on that. “I need her alive. Quite apart from the quality of the genetic sample, I also think she might be of use as a behavioural specimen. She’s been trained to follow commands already…” 

Eli waved him off before he had a chance to get to the meat of the argument. “Y’know, I don’t need the details,” he said. “Sure. Live raptor to study. That’s why we got Grady in the first place. Don’t worry, we’ll get you your raptor.”

“For the future of your weapons program, I hope you do,” Henry said. 

\----

“Is this really the kind of cage you would have kept me cooped up in if I was just an animal?” Aurelius asked, looking around at the small space. It was bare concrete constructing the side walls, ceiling and floor, with heavy steel bars at the front and a sliding steel door at the rear leading to a basic elevator. He took the few brief steps from one side to the other, turned, and paced a tight circle. “I’m certain I would have tried to kill you.”

“ _I_ would not have chosen to keep you in such a cage,” Henry corrected him. “If you recall this place was designed for our first experiments, dinosaurs of much smaller size than you. They were mere proofs of concept, sickly beasts for the most part. None of us expected a long lifespan from any of them.”

“But Mr Mills thinks you’ve been keeping me locked up in something like this,” Aurelius said, continuing to sound distressed. Henry had never been much given to worrying about the welfare of his specimens once they had been hatched. They were mere stepping stones on the road to his final creation, the son who now stood before him. Yet he didn’t truly think Aurelius was concerned about animals either, but a fate that still might be his if things went very, very badly. 

“Eli Mills knows very little about animal husbandry,” Wu said aloud. “I doubt he has considered whether or not the weapon he thinks you are is comfortable.”

Aurelius snarled, but a short and quiet thing. “I don’t want to be in there for any longer than necessary,” he said. 

“You will not be,” Henry promised. “You’ve seen the timeline for the next few weeks. As soon as the auction is complete and the dinosaurs have been shipped off…”

Aurelius sighed. “Yes father. I do understand. All these humans coming to work in the lab though, they aren’t just to look after the Isla Nublar dinosaurs for the few hours they’ll be here though, are they? Mr Mills wants to use the money to keep them on and work on his weapons.”

Henry nodded. It was going to be strange for them both having other people around, and there was some concern in his mind that one of them might notice something out of the ordinary about Aurelius. He had worried for the same reason about the Indominus Rex however, and nobody had noticed how intelligent she was until she masterminded her own escape. Their preconceptions about what a dinosaur was blinded them to everything that didn’t quite fit. 

“They will be here during standard working hours only,” he said, to try and reassure Aurelius on a point they had already discussed several times. “Once they leave, you and I will have the place to ourselves again. You can spend most of the night out in the forest, and sleep in the cage during the day. It will only be for a short while.”

“Until you’ve made some eggs, yes,” Aurelius said. He didn’t meet Henry’s eyes, and was tapping his claws against the floor irritably. 

“And until we have the raptor,” Henry said. As the shape of the future envisioned in Eli’s mind had become more clear to him over the past week, so too had the only possible reaction to it. The risks to Aurelius of staying had become too great, for all that leaving would mean forfeiting Henry’s access to the equipment required to create more Indoraptors. However many eggs he could create in the next few weeks would have to be sufficient. 

“Fine, fine, I can be patient,” Aurelius said. “I don’t like it, but I can see there’s no other choice.”

\----

Aurelius shifted in the darkness of his cage and tried to sleep. He’d been out running most of last night but it had barely tired him out. He was too worried about the auction and what would happen after it. Besides, the concrete floor was cold and hard, unlike the nest of cushions and bean-bag chairs he had assembled upstairs. He didn’t quite see why he couldn’t have had them down here too, but he supposed it must be because the human scientists would think it in some way odd. 

There were raised voices coming from upstairs. Aurelius pulled himself quietly to his feet and slunk towards the front of the cage, lifting his head up to hear as best he could. He recognised the voices as Father and Mr Mills, but he wasn’t able to make out enough words to know what they were arguing about. 

He hoped it was nothing to do with him. Father had already lost an argument recently about showing Aurelius off at the auction. Mr Mills had been clear that this was _just_ showing him off, giving them ‘a taste’ of what they might be able to buy in the future, but Aurelius still worried. He didn’t want strangers looking at him like a performing animal. He was sure Mr Mills still thought he was far too dangerous to actually take the risk of selling him, but… 

The sense of ‘what if’ was gnawing away at him. 

The voices were still echoing, distorted, from above him, but there was another noise underneath them, closer. Something breathing fast, with light footsteps. In the short corridor which led from the main hall down to his cage a figure suddenly appeared with its back to him. It was small, perhaps two-thirds the height of Father and slender in its build. It didn’t look around - all its attention was fixed on where it had come from. 

It was a human child. Aurelius had never seen one in person, but he had seen many on television shows. He was fairly certain from that context that a child shouldn’t be down here. 

Father and Mr Mills came down the staircase this little one had descended, continuing their argument. Neither noticed the child, striding out into the middle of the hall instead. Aurelius paid brief attention to their words but it just seemed to be a reiteration of things he knew they had discussed before. No, the child was much more interesting. He bent low to the bars and reached out through them, moving very slowly so as not to startle the little one. 

As his hand got closer Aurelius paused. He stretched out his claws, comparing their length to that of the human’s body. He could quite easily have wrapped his fingers around her entirely, and the dark claws themselves were larger than her head. He drew back. Perhaps not that way. 

Instead he dropped down onto his belly and tucked his hands beneath him. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Hey little girl?” 

The child looked around and her eyes went so wide they were almost perfect circles. Aurelius looked at her in alarm. “Wait, wait, please!” he said. “Don’t scream!”

He could see the words reach her, almost put a claw on the exact moment she realised that he was the one who had spoken. She blinked, and her mouth, which had started to open, snapped closed again. 

“You need to be very quiet if you don’t want to get caught down here,” he warned her. 

The girl looked around warily. There was no-one to be seen back the way she had come. Father and Mr Mills must have finished talking. Mr Mills had probably gone back upstairs, but Father would still be around. Probably he should call for him to come down and see what this girl was up to, but he was too curious. He wanted to talk to her first. 

He probably shouldn’t be doing this, Aurelius realised. He wasn’t supposed to talk to humans. But this was a child, and he had gathered human children often made up stories. He’d seen a few of the shows which were aimed towards them and which often seemed to feature talking animals - if she told anyone they would think she was simply being fanciful. 

“Can you… can you talk?” the little girl said. She took a few cautious steps closer to the cage. Aurelius didn’t move, not wanting to scare her off. He nodded. 

“What are you?” she asked, looking up at him. “I’ve never seen pictures of a dinosaur that looked like you.”

“You wouldn’t have,” he told her. “I’m made of lots of different genes - do you know what genes are?”

“Of course I know what genes are,” she said, looking affronted. “But… even if there’s genes of lots of different dinosaurs making you up, dinosaurs couldn’t talk.”

“How do you know?” Aurelius asked her, teasing. “You weren’t alive millions of years ago. They might have.”

“Nuh-uh,” the girl said, folding her arms across her chest emphatically. “Only humans can talk.”

“What about parrots, and birds like them? Dinosaurs were sort of birds.”

The girl paused. He’d made her doubt her certainty. He was winning the argument. This was _fun_. 

“If you can talk, do you have a name?” the girl asked. 

“Yes!” He probably should have introduced himself a little earlier in the conversation. She hadn’t either though, so it wasn’t entirely his fault. “It’s Aurelius. What about yours?”

“It’s Maisie,” the child said. “Maisie Lockwood. Aurelius is an interesting name.”

“My father gave it to me.” 

She looked confused. “Your father? Do you mean the man who made you? Was it the man who was arguing with Mr Mills?”

“That’s right,” Aurelius said. “His name is Henry Wu. He’s been trying to make someone like me for years now. I don’t normally live down here in a cage,” he added. “It’s just while the auction is going on, and a little while afterwards.”

Maisie had crept a little closer, and was peering past him into the cage. “It doesn’t look very comfortable,” she said. “Is there enough space for you in there?”

“I know,” Aurelius said, trying not to sound like he was whining. He wanted this little human to have a good impression of him. This was kind of like practise for the future, when he and Father would be living in the wilderness and trying to find some humans who would accept them into their social tribe. “I don’t like it, but it’s only going to be for a little while.”

Maisie looked around at the lab, at the other cages visible from where they were. “Mr Mills is bringing the other dinosaurs down here,” she said, almost to herself. “He’s going to sell them. Is he going to sell you too?”

Aurelius couldn’t stop his tail from lashing - it hit the wall of the cage with a loud thud that made Maisie flinch. “No, he’s not,” he said, trying not to display his teeth too aggressively. “He promised Father he won’t - and he thinks I’m too dangerous anyway.”

“What he’s doing is wrong,” Maisie said firmly. “Your father shouldn’t be helping him.”

“Father only works for Mr Mills because he needs to,” Aurelius replied. “He needed a place like this so he could make me - we’re only waiting until…” He stopped. He was saying too much. “He won’t be working for him too much longer after this anyway.”

Maisie bit her lip. “There isn’t any way he could stop the auction is there?”

Aurelius shook his head. 

Maisie nodded firmly. “Then my grandfather will just have to take care of it. He promised he would, but I don’t know if he believed me. He will now if I tell him…”

“Please don’t tell him about me,” Aurelius said, interrupting her. “Please Maisie.”

She looked at him with wide eyes, but nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Just about the lab down here, and your father working here? Can I tell him about that?”

“Yes, that should be fine,” Aurelius agreed.

“Mr Mills won’t dare disobey him anyway,” Maisie said, with sharp satisfaction. “Goodbye Aurelius! I hope you get out of that cage soon!”

She trotted away, her footfalls quiet. Aurelius turned back to the darkness. If she did manage to stop the auction Eli Mills wouldn’t have the money he needed and they would probably have to leave even sooner, but if it meant not having to go up there and be shown off to a crowd of strangers, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

\----

Aurelius didn’t know if he had been expecting to see Maisie again any time soon, but he found himself missing that brief contact with another person. He enjoyed talking to his father, but there had never been anyone else to spend time with until now. He had never realised before that he was lonely. 

A few more hours passed. Night crept onwards. People began to arrive, pacing around the lower hall with guns or walking to and fro on the catwalks overhead. Aurelius didn’t pay them any real attention. He was waiting for any sign that things had changed, that the plan wasn’t going ahead. There was no evidence of it. 

Eventually a great swell of noise started to filter down from the loading bay, conducted through the concrete and the ducts and pipes that laced it. Aurelius looked up from where he had been lying coiled and half-dozing. The sound was layered but formless at this distance, distorted. It wasn’t long however before the machinery hidden within the furthest rear walls of the laboratory began to whir into life. The hidden lifts began to work, and there was a grinding noise from one of the cages Aurelius couldn’t see. Then heavy footfalls and growls. The first of the Isla Nublar dinosaurs had arrived. 

Not long after that Aurelius’ attention was caught by a couple of humans who were being escorted through the lower hall at gunpoint. It was only a brief glance, not enough to even catch a proper sight of their faces, but the fact that they very clearly were not here willingly was startling enough. He heard the door of one of the cages open and shut. They must have locked them up. By themselves rather than in with a dinosaur, to judge from the lack of screaming. Curiosity burned away at him, but he couldn’t see any way of finding out what it was all about until the next time he saw his Father, which meant after the auction. 

He could hear them talking, and a vaguely familiar voice answering them. After a few moments he placed it as Eli Mills. He strained to hear what they were talking about - it seemed to be about the auction. The strangers disapproved of it, felt they had been used in some way. The voices rose and fell and were distorted by the echoes from the cavernous space they were standing in. Some things were lost in the noise. 

Eventually Mr Mills left. Not long after, the first of the dinosaurs was ushered back into the hidden lift and Aurelius knew the auction must have begun. 

\----

Henry Wu was not feeling happy about the night thus far but he let none of his concerns affect him externally. Eli had insisted he should attend the auction itself, so here he was sitting amongst a crowd of the world’s richest and least moral people, watching his creations be wheeled out and sold off for what he personally would have regarded as less than their value. He _should_ have been downstairs in the laboratory, taking delivery of Blue and making sure her injuries had been appropriately treated. Eli had assured him that a qualified veterinarian had operated on her during the transit, and that she was entirely stable now, but he distrusted Eli’s opinions on the matter. 

It would be a blow indeed to have come this far, secured the raptor, only to have her die on them when he could have been downstairs ensuring that didn’t happen. 

It also bothered him that Claire Dearing and Owen Grady were here, currently locked up. He had been told they had been left on the island where death was inevitable. He had regarded this as unfortunate and wasteful, but a sad necessity under the circumstances. Instead they had apparently managed to board the transport ship, remain hidden for the length of the voyage up the west coast of the Americas to California, and then permitted to drive one of the Jeeps almost to the estate before being captured. It seemed… sloppy. 

It also left the question of what was to be done with them now. Henry had begun his next clutches of Indoraptors and they were incubating even now in the lab - unknown to Eli who had been told the eggs were still pre-implantation of embryos. He had hoped to wait until they were hatched and mobile before leaving. He had difficulty imagining Ms Dearing and Mr Grady would remain peacefully locked up for that length of time however, and he was uncertain that Eli had the stomach for cold-blooded murder. 

Such thoughts as these were driven out of his head as Mr Eversoll the auctioneer began to speak. “And now ladies and gentlemen we are half-way through the evening. We’d like to offer a special treat to our _discriminating_ buyers. This evening we will preview a new asset we’ve been developing. A creature of the future, made from pieces of the past.”

The man continued in this vein as the doors at the end of the hall began to open, and a cage slid forwards. Aurelius was inside, at first no more than a silhouette against the lights, roaring and growling as they had planned. He continued his show as the cage rolled out. Eli’s men ran shock-prods against the bars of the cage in discharges of electrical energy, just another piece of theatre. It all rang hollow and pointless to Henry. He kept his gaze on Aurelius, who he did not think had caught sight of him yet in the room. 

Mr Eversoll was continuing his discussion of the military applications of the Indoraptor. It was boasts and empty words for the most part. The demonstration of the so-called ‘targeting system’ went well at least. The auctioneer was just beginning to wind up the show when one of the guests spoke up, trying to make a bid. 

“No, this is just a prototype,” the auctioneer said, as he had been briefed to do. “It’s not for sale.”

Henry tried to let himself relax. He knew this had been a possibility, had discussed it with Eli, but he had been assured… 

“Twenty one,” someone else shouted. Mr Eversoll tried to deflect again but more voices were adding to the chorus of bids. Henry felt a horrible void start to open up in his stomach. He glared hard at the auctioneer, shaking his head emphatically, but in the face of the escalating bids it was not him that Mr Eversoll turned to but to Eli Mills. 

Henry saw the small nod Eli gave in response and felt the bitter pains of anger and panic. He got up and started walking at speed across the front of the crowd towards the podium. He hoped Eli would listen to reason, but if he didn’t then he wouldn’t let Aurelius leave this building in a cage. They would both be going tonight, with Blue and all the eggs they could carry between them.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey, this is a fic that exists. Sorry for the long delay folks. I'm gonna try and finish this so it's not just left hanging

Maisie struggled not to cry as she followed the two grown-ups through the maze of tunnels under the mansion. Nothing seemed like it made sense anymore. Grandfather… grandfather was dead. He would never hug her again. Never tell her stories. Never stroke her hair and reassure her that everything was going to be alright. The thought that he might not be around some day had never crossed her mind before - he simply was there, always and forever. Her world - the mansion and everything around it, all she had ever known - moved to his orders and under his perfect control. Only now that was gone too. Mr Mills was in charge, and tonight he was going to do terrible things. 

She hadn’t known what she’d hoped, going down the dumb-waiter to the basement. Her first thoughts had been about getting away from Mr Mills, and then she had considered climbing out at the kitchen. Instead she had carried on. Down and ever downwards, to a place she had been only once before, earlier tonight. 

Maybe she had wanted to find someone who could help her down there. Aurelius… the dinosaur who could talk, who had calmed her down and asked friendly questions and… who just seemed so nice! It didn’t make sense that he even existed, but then nothing today had made much sense.  _ He  _ didn’t want the auction to happen,  _ he  _ didn’t like Mr Mills, so… so maybe… 

Only when she arrived he wasn’t there. Instead there were the grown-ups. 

That was help, she supposed. Not useful help maybe, but all she wanted now was to run away and find a place to hide and cry. They were going to help her with that.

They went up, though not all the way up to the house itself. They slunk past pipes in dusty corridors that looked like they rarely got cleaned, up a flight of stairs until they heard the sound of people - lots of people. There were grates looking out from their corridor into a big hall - somewhere else Maisie had never seen before. How much was hidden down here? How much of her home did she not know anything about? 

This had to be the auction. She could see Mr Wu - Aurelius’ father - sitting in the crowd of people gathered down there. And Mr Mills! He was here too, up the front next to a small man behind a podium who was talking. He was talking about… some new dinosaur. A weapon, he called it. She wasn’t really paying attention, too caught up in the raw hurt feeling inside of her chest, not until the doors opened and a cage slid out into the room. Then her eyes went wide. 

Aurelius! Only… he’d told her he wasn’t going to be sold! And he was acting differently, angry and like an animal, like a normal dinosaur. He wasn’t talking, wasn’t objecting - although maybe they didn’t know he could talk. Maybe talking would just make the people bid more money for him. She bit her bottom lip, worry a sick pit in her stomach. She barely knew Aurelius, but she certainly didn’t want something as bad as this to happen to him. She  _ liked  _ him. 

“What  _ is _ that thing?” Ms Dearing whispered next to her. 

Maisie looked up at her indignantly. “He’s not a  _ thing _ ,” she said. “His name is Aurelius.”

“It has a  _ name _ ?” Ms Dearing’s friend said, like he couldn’t believe that. 

“Of course he does,” Maisie said, frowning. “Mr Wu made him - that’s who gave him his name.”

The short man was still talking, speaking about Aurelius like he really was a thing, not a… a basically a person. She could see Aurelius was furious. Of course he would be - she would be angry too if someone spoke about  _ her _ like that. Even so he was playing along with what was going on, this strange horrible demonstration. She didn’t know why. She supposed maybe he didn’t have a choice about it. The men with the electric prods were walking just outside the cage and maybe if he didn’t obey they would shock him and hurt him… 

Then the bidding started. At first Maisie almost relaxed because it looked like Aurelius had been right and they weren’t going to sell him, but when people started shouting more and more, that changed. She wasn’t the only one who was starting to panic about it - she saw Mr Wu get up and stride through the crowd over towards the podium, having a whispered, angry conversation. He was trying to protect him just like a father was meant to, but she wasn’t sure it was going to be enough. 

“That thing can’t leave this building.” Mr Brady said. He turned to walk away and Maisie started to follow him. She wasn’t sure what he could do to stop the auction and save Aurelius, but if she could help him then she had to. He turned back to her though and put out a hand. “You stay here with Claire,” he said. “This is probably going to get me kil… caught by security. It’s not safe.”

“I want to help,” she insisted. 

“You can help me by staying here,” he told her. “That way I don’t have to worry about looking after you as well.”

It hurt, but she nodded and bit back more tears. They kept on being close to the surface right now, a tightness in her throat, a torrent behind floodgates waiting to burst. He disappeared around the corner. 

“He’s got to save him,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve to be sold.”

Ms Dearing put her arms around her from behind, hugging her. “None of the dinosaurs do,” she said. “We’re going to try and stop all of that, I promise Maisie.”

\----

Aurelius was seething with rage, yet he could do nothing. Trapped within the narrow bars of his cage he was at the mercy of the humans sitting around him, smug in their imagined superiority. They thought they were safe - right now at least they  _ were _ safe, much as he hated to admit it. He could see no means of escaping at present. That did not mean no opportunity would come. After he had been…  _ sold _ , and how he  _ hated _ that it was even happening… they would have to prepare him for transport and maybe then… 

Father hadn’t known this would happen. That was some comfort at least. He had tried to prevent it. The greed of Eli Mills had simply over-ruled him. He had disappeared from the room after that, which was another reason to hope. Father was surely looking for a way to get them both out of this. He only had to endure. 

At the back of the room the elevator slid open. There was… a dinosaur in it. He recognised it from Father’s books as an adult male specimen of  _ Stygimoloch _ , a small herbivore species. It must have escaped from the cages downstairs somehow, but that failed to explain how it had made its way into the elevator and up here. The humans didn’t notice it at first, not until it charged at them.

What followed could surely only be described as utter chaos. The little dinosaur thundered through the crowd tossing chairs and people alike into the air with apparent ease. Humans scattered like prey, their panicked stink filling his nostrils much as the scent of frightened deer had in the past. He turned to watch the  _ Stygimoloch _ go with growing amusement. It was not exactly a  _ solution _ to the problem of being imprisoned, but it was certainly disrupting the auction well enough. 

As yet another human was tossed aloft he could not stop himself from letting out a muffled laugh. It was too human a sound, he knew, and yet it was impossible to resist. 

A human had followed the  _ Stygimoloch  _ out of the lift. Aurelius hadn’t paid him any attention at first, but when he started fighting the security guards that changed. He seemed somehow familiar, but he couldn’t put a claw on quite why. As the man tusselled, Aurelius found that his own cage was sliding backwards towards the lift and thus back towards the laboratory below. Or, he supposed, the loading docks, but he couldn’t imagine they would send him there right now. They would expect the lab to be more secure, and no doubt Father was down there and could let him out… 

The human was trying to stop the cage. Aurelius snarled as grabbed the level controlling the mechanism and he came to a shuddering halt. The man was looking at him. He was afraid, but trying not to show it. He certainly wasn’t letting the fear make him run and squeal like most frightened humans Aurelius had encountered in the past. 

Interesting. 

He wondered if it would be worth taking a chance on speaking. If this man objected to the auction perhaps he looked favourably on dinosaurs as a species - perhaps his reaction would be a positive one? However he did not get the chance to make up his mind. The man watched him only long enough to reassure himself that Aurelius was secured in the auction room before he took off running. Soon the room was empty entirely. Aurelius snapped his jaws in frustration. What now?

“Mills? Mills where are you?” 

Aurelius snapped his head around to face the new human who was approaching. This one was  _ not _ familiar, but something about his clothing, his attitude, was. Not from life, not from something Aurelius had himself experienced, but… from the television. ‘Big game hunter’ his mind supplied, and yes, the description appeared to be apt. 

The man’s demeanour changed when he saw Aurelius. More so when Aurelius tried to warn him off - more to see how he would react than anything. The rifle came down off his shoulder immediately, barrel pointing at Aurelius. He had a moment to wonder if he had miscalculated before the man fired. 

Two almost-silent hisses. Two light pricks of pain from his neck. Was being shot really so insignificant as this? 

Then the wave of lassitude hit him. He swayed on his feet, suddenly as tired as he had ever been. Drugs. Tranquilisers, to be precise. 

Through hazy vision he saw the man raise the rifle again and made a swift decision. He let himself fall against the side of the cage, shaking his head as if in a daze. Then he turned and let himself collapse bodily to the floor. Let the man think he was asleep. Then perhaps he would go away again and leave him to recover. 

He didn’t leave. Instead he actually came closer and then  _ opened the door of the cage _ . Aurelius remained utterly still. He had no idea what the human’s intentions were here, and he was wary of what he did not understand. Metal creaked and boots whispered softly over the textured floor. The man was coming closer. 

“Look at you,” he said, and his boot nudged Aurelius’ chin. He let his head loll, moving with the push. More metal sounds, and then a tug at his jaw. It took a few moments to process. He was… he was trying to  _ pull out a tooth _ . What was the human thinking! Even if he had been fully tranquillised, surely the man was taking a great risk that the pain would awaken him regardless. No, he wasn’t going to allow this. 

What would distract the human? 

Aurelius lifted his tail into the air, and risked a quick peek. The human had looked away as he dropped his tail back down, but he was turning back and he had to shut his eyes quickly to avoid his ruse being detected. Nothing to see here human. Just a perfectly ordinary sleeping dinosaur. 

The man bent and took a better grip around his fang. Again, Aurelius lifted his tail. This time the man let go and turned properly, so that his whole torso was twisted away. Time to strike. Aurelius lifted his head from the floor and lunged. 

His fangs closed on softness. Liquid, sharp and hot and meaty, gushed onto his tongue. Blood. He had the man’s arm in his jaws, and it was nothing at all to lift him up off the floor and let him dangle by it. The human was crying out, though less than he might have imagined. When he hunted in the forest the prey let out ear-splitting wounded shrieks - until he learned to kill them with a single blow, at least. The human struggled in his grasp, and he bit down harder instinctively trying to keep his grip. 

Something parted with a wet ripping. The hanging weight dropped, leaving flesh and bone behind. 

_ Oh no _ , Aurelius thought to himself.  _ I didn’t actually mean to do that. _

He let the limb drop to the floor. He had eaten today already, and the thought of consuming part of an actual  _ person _ made him feel queasy in a way he found hard to define. In the end it was all meat, but… it made him think sickeningly of hurting his Father, and he would  _ never _ do that. 

It did leave the question of what to do with the human. There was blood pouring out of the stump that was all that was left of his arm, pooling and pattering between the bars of the cage and onto the floor below. If he was not helped, he would probably bleed out like this, and Aurelius was not exactly equipped for first aid. Leave him be, he decided after a few moments thought. If he survived, he survived. If not… he  _ had _ chosen to climb inside the cage of an apex predator. 

Aurelius shrugged, a long, sinuous motion, and pushed the cage door open. Father would be waiting for him somewhere. 

Behind him someone screamed. 

He whipped round. There was a woman standing in the open doors of the elevator, looking straight at him. He blinked, shrinking back slightly at the painful pitch of the noise before the doors slid shut on her. Fine. He hardly cared about that. Only… he didn’t know how to get back downstairs from here. He didn’t know how to get  _ anywhere _ from here. The only route he knew was from the lab to the loading bay and outside. 

He sighed. He wasn’t left with much choice - and the elevator was starting to move. He crossed the distance in a few quick strides and slapped the control panel angrily with his claws. His experience of media told him that should open the thing. The panel spat sparks - less helpful - but the door slid open again even so. 

The woman was not the only human inside. The auctioneer was here as well. Aurelius let his jaws hang apart slightly in grim amusement. Given the betrayal he had pulled by trying to  _ sell _ him, he had no doubt Father would want to speak to this man  _ most keenly _ . 

He pushed his way into the lift, ignoring the humans ducking past his tail in their rush to escape him, and wrapped his claws around the man who whimpered in his grasp. The acrid scent of urine rose from the puddle forming beneath the man’s feet. 

Aurelius waited until the two of them were alone in the lift before he spoke. “You are going to help me get out of here,” he said, and watched the man’s eyes go wide and perhaps even more afraid. “Otherwise you shall suffer the same fate as that man out there.” 


End file.
